Politics v baseball

This has been the week of the so-called World Series. If Americans played soccer more than they play baseball, I'm sure it would still be called the World Series, though what it means is they're holding their domestic Cup Final. The Cup Final, then, of the baseball season. That's as far as I'm going to go – you'll be relieved to hear – about the actual game of baseball. Baseball, like golf, is an addiction. To non-addicts, it's a dreadful bore. Addicts, wherever they live, anywhere in the world, don't need to be told anything by an outsider. They know all the latest wrinkles about the supply of the latest drug and what it does and how to get it.

I remember the first time I was back in England after a two-year exposure to this country and its customs, including this extraordinary game, which interested me then about as much as curling or needlework does now. I was invited at this time of the year – the week of the baseball championship always happens in the fall – to go to the Harvard Club in London to listen to the World Series; the magical word was 'listen'. It seems that until then the expatriate addicts had had to gather round a news ticker at breathless intervals and watch the score as it was tapped out in print. But that year (it was before the Second War), somebody, the BBC, RCA, I don't remember, somebody arranged a radio circuit across the Atlantic and the Harvard Club of London sent out invitations with enthusiasm bordering on frenzy. Come and listen to the thing itself, by the courtesy of Mr Marconi's invention. 

London, then, as now, was five hours ahead of New York and if I remember aright, those were the years, in the mid Thirties, when the New York Yankees were the almost automatic Titans of the game. Anyway, the game that we were to hear was being played in New York. The starting time was, as always then, 1 p.m. So six o'clock in London was the perfect social hour at which American businessmen in London could dispose of their chores, rush over to the Harvard Club, receive a tumbler in their right hand and settle to the unique experience of hearing the thing play by play. And, may I say, that to this day, there are baseball fans who actually prefer to hear a baseball commentary on radio than watch it on television, for baseball commentary, which is a language as incomprehensible to a non-addict as Swahili is to a white racist, it's extremely precise and quick and gives a mental picture of the field and every physical move of the players, quite as vivid as the picture in the mind of a world chess player; his picture of every move he made in the game that made him champion. 

Well, in those days, the transatlantic circuit was a radio circuit and it came at us in whimsical gusts, like showers of autumn leaves, sometimes a blizzard, sometimes a patter, sometimes one leaf. Even if it had been crystal-clear, I would have been about as hep – it used to be hep and then it was hip and now I understand it's hap – I would have been as 'hap' to what was going on as if I'd been sitting in on a pow-wow of African tribal chiefs. But the inhaling and exhaling of the radio circuit only served to tantalise these Americans far from home. They bent around the radio set, practically on their knees – African chiefs at a prayer meeting – and when it was all over they had never dreamed of anything so wonderful. What will they think of next? 

None of us dreamed of the day when people in theatres in Sheffield and Buenos Aires and Sydney and Bangkok would watch Muhammad Ali earning $7 million in 20 minutes in a ring in Haiti or Los Angeles. Incidentally, the box office take from all those millions around the globe is the reason why Ali was earning $7 million instead of the enormous purse of – was it $10,000? – that Jack Dempsey got for knocking out Carpentier in 1921. 

Well, if this had not been a presidential year, the World Series would have blanketed most political news just as the prospect of a British Gold Medal in the Olympics blanketed for a week or two concern for the state of the pound sterling, but we have only two weeks to go – we all thank the Lord – before we shall know, as one gloomy man put it, 'whom we're to be saddled with'. 

And there was an interesting collision the other evening between the national mania for baseball and the national ordeal of the election. There's been a great and understandable fuss this year about the fact that the baseball games are being played at night. This, as you must have heard me say before, is the magical time of the year and almost invariably the World Series is played over most of a week – the championship goes to the winner of four games in seven – on days of sparkling light and balmy warmth, but this year we've had, for us, almost as crazy a fall as you had a summer – about 20 degrees colder than usual. A brilliant, but sharp day in the 50s followed by a day of torrential rain and howling winds. And then, predictably, another day of blinding light, but sharp. Sharper still, in the evenings. Why should this game which brings out vast crowds by day suddenly have to be played at night? 

The answer – which has considerably rankled the baseball world – is because the television networks want it that way. In the past 20 years or so, we've seen most games come under the dictate of the television networks because they want the most money they can get from advertisers and most money comes from the biggest watching audience and most people are home at night. It's as simple as that. The players prefer daylight, whether crystalline or grey to the bone-white glare of the Klieg lights but, as in tennis, the players are no longer consulted. 

Well, a third antagonist (protagonist?) got into the act last Friday. The World Series started last Saturday, the 16th, in Cincinnati. This year it's the Cincinnati Reds versus the New York Yankees, who have been under a cloud for a dozen years or so. Cincinnati won the first two games. Then they took a day off while the teams flew to New York. On Tuesday, they came to Yankee Stadium and again Cincinnati won 3–0. Only one more to clinch the championship. Not the most exciting World Series there has ever been. The Yankees are a good team with chronic weaknesses. The Cincinnati Reds are a great team who begin to press on the nerves of their opponents in the early innings and then strangle them in the end. 

But the fourth game was supposed to be played on Wednesday night, whereupon the cloudless skies of Tuesday were engulfed by a colossal storm, warnings to the ships at sea, coastal floods and an empty stadium. Thursday dawned. As always happens after a fall storm, in a light that never was on land or sea, suggesting that the painters of the Italian Renaissance groped their way through an encircling gloom, the kind of day when the very notion of smog or pollution is an absurdity. 

Now the Yankees had to win that game to stay alive which would leave Friday, tonight to some of you, as the night of the fifth game. When? At what time? That's the rub. The games have been starting at 8.30, but a baseball game takes several hours and 9.30 on Friday was the arranged time of the last of the presidential debates. As one sportswriter put it, 'Not even the Baseball Commissioner wanted to take on Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter at the same time.' 

Of course, they weren't thinking of the crowd at Yankee Stadium which would be up there even if 9.30 were the starting time for a nuclear war. They, the networks, were thinking of the 60 or 70 million television viewers who would be watching the last, public battle – public recital, at least – of the two presidential candidates instead of watching the World Series. And, perforce, being hooked into appeals for this incredible razor blade, that divine perfume and the other glorious beer. (By the way, down all these years, I have suppressed my thoughts about American beer in the interests of Anglo-American friendship.) 

Well, this was a dilemma or stalemate of horrifying proportions. Somebody was naive enough to ask the Baseball Commissioner's office when the National Broadcasting Company would let baseball know what time the fifth game would start. To which the commissioner’s public relations man snapped back, 'Baseball will let NBC know when it's going to play the game.' That brave retort can be defined, I'm afraid, as a whistle in the wind. 

Ultimately in all sports these days, the decision about when any championship will be played – boxing, tennis, hockey, football, basketball, I guess night golf isn't far away – the decision will be made by the television presidents. So, while I'm talking to you, there is a great summit meeting going on between the Baseball Commissioner's staff, the managers of the two teams, and the television company. 

Will the fifth game start at 1 p.m. and sacrifice the (huger) audience that will be at work and, therefore, immune to appeals to switch razor blades or perfumes or beers? Should the game start at 10.30 p.m. and lose the senior citizens who like to be in bed at midnight, game or no game, shaven or unshaven? The problem is agonised by the fact that the same network is carrying both the games and the presidential debate. 

The one consolation is that the networks do not yet decide when the president and his opponent may take to the air. They do have a big say. Eight-thirty has most people in the east at home; 7.30, same thing in the mid-west; 6.30, most people are eating in the mountain states and at 5.30, presumably the people on the west coast are dashing home to watch. 

But there was no suggestion that the Messrs Ford and Carter should go on in the afternoon or wait till midnight. Some priorities remain, though with 34 million registered voters saying they're not going to vote, you may well wonder what the hassle's all about. 

Put on the Reds versus the Yanks and Gerry versus Jimmy, alternately, at the same time! No, that would produce a disastrous drop in the viewing audience for the Carter-Ford bout, causing the Stock Market to drop still farther. 

For, as the editor of a financial weekly wrote this week, 'The reason the Stock Market has gone down is because the American people fear that either Ford or Carter is going to be elected.’

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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